ABSTRACT
The international community’s understanding of war-affected societies and the processes leading to peace have improved significantly in recent years, particularly with the need for effective approaches to deal with unstable, failed, recovering, volatile, and poorly governed states and their restive populations. As knowledge grows of how and why civil wars occur, end, and often recur, efforts must progress beyond the pursuit of peacebuilding priorities as separate endeavors toward their integration. The need comes with the realization that conflict-related and stable settings are profoundly different. Peacebuilding projects and policies, although derived and implemented separately and on their own merits, interact on the ground in a largely unplanned and unexamined manner. Success in one area of peacebuilding can cause problems in another, and there can be unexpected and often volatile repercussions from interactions between priorities. As lessons learned in peacebuilding become more widely known, the opportunity emerges to examine harmful interactions between priorities to mitigate acutely negative outcomes at a minimum and, more ideally, enhance prospects for interactions to contribute to durable peace.
